Posted
by
timothy
on Tuesday June 05, 2012 @12:08PM
from the note-this-is-an-editorial dept.

TaeKwonDood writes "We've all seen the stories about how 'dismal' science education in America is. It turns out that it's kind of a straw man. America has long led the world in science but the 'average' score for Americans on standardized tests has never been good. Instead, every 2 years American kids get better but we keep being told things are terrible. Here is why."

Every few years we have people trying to legislate science out of the class room because it conflicts with their vision of religion. Of course our science classes are messed up, people have a vested interest in them being so. Frankly, much of what is taught is not even science. Anyone who comes out of high school thinking that science is about facts has been done a disservice.

And on the science vs religion front. Religion has rewritten itself often to adjust to realities that science has postulated. Science has never changed based on belief. So as a betting man, my money is on science. But as a scientist, I accept the possibility that I could be wrong.

For it to be science, it has to be based on observable evidence and not belief. What you are talking about is the moment when what you believe is shown to be wrong, which is a change in belief and not a change in science.

For it to be science, it has to be based on observable evidence and not belief.

That is the ideal. In reality, scientists are human, are prone to error, and often become attached to bad ideas. For instance, it took decades for plate tectonics to become accepted scientific theory, even among experts, even in the face of solid predictions and observations.

I assume that the grandparent poster was using the term "paradigm shift" in the way that Thomas Kuhn used it in The Structure of Scientific Revolution. While there are many valid critiques of his work, Kuhn was a sociologist, and sought to describe the way that science is actually done, rather than how scientists feel it should be done---that is, the book should be read more as an ethnography of scientists than a manual for doing science. In that context, Kuhn's thesis is that the community of scientists gloms onto a particular paradigm or way of seeing the world. Once such a paradigm becomes entrenched, it is difficult to replace it, and an "old guard" may actively suppress new paradigms through selective publication. Eventually, the evidence becomes overwhelming and the new theory is accepted (or the old guard dies off, and the new theory is accepted).

In this way, the ideal of science (i.e. science based on observation and experimentation) is ultimately born out, but the route is not as direct as many scientists might claim it to be.

I guess for you to understand you'd have to read a little bit. Changes in science happen all the time. Read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions [wikipedia.org]. Thomas Kuhn is the guy who created the idea, not me. People that hold to the old scientific paradigm do so out of belief in their paradigm. They continue to use science to give more credence to their theory long after it has been falsified. These are reasoned and logical highly intelligent scientists, yet they ignore falsificat

Every few years we have people trying to legislate science out of the class room because it conflicts with their vision of religion. Of course our science classes are messed up, people have a vested interest in them being so.

Oh Rubbish. One of the reasons why people think science education is bad is this kind of nonsense. "There's a religious conspiracy to kill science!!!". Please.

The nasty truth of it is that there are two kinds of problem with science education, and neither of them are related to religion whatsoever. The first is a huge section of students with generally poor scores in science classes and tests. But these students almost always have poor scores in everything, so it's not a science problem here, it's an education problem as a whole, which could be anything from bad teachers and schools, to.. and this is more likely... unmotivated students that frankly don't care about school, with parents that could care even less. All of the money and resources and promotion of science education in the world won't change this.

The second problem really isn't a problem at all. It comes from scientists and mathematicians and educators that are unhappy that more kids aren't taking an interest in hard science classes. We regularly see lamentations from these advocates that America is sliding to hell in a handbasket if we don't have more high schoolers taking calculus, physics, software development classes, etc. But this is foolish. Most people aren't going to become scientists anymore than most people aren't going to become engineers or symphony conductors or astronauts. Professional math and science fields tend to be an elite, populated by a few capable people that are highly motivated and truly love what they do. That's reality, and if you don't like it, tough. You can no more make more scientists out of our kids than you can make more Beethovens.One of the problems I have with movies like "Stand and Deliver" is the idea that if we just had a few more Jaime Escalantes in our classrooms, we'd have this wave of untapped Isaac Newtons just waiting to make new discoveries in math and science. And it just isn't true.

Most people are not particularly brilliant at anything. Most people, with work and experience, can become at least competent, and maybe good at something. But these somethings are usually pretty ordinary fields. Unless they destroy themselves with bad decisions... drug addiction, for example... then most kids generally gravitate to what they want to do if they have any motivation. And if they don't have any motivation, then they just work at whatever pays the bills. The former might take an interest in science, but most wont. The later is pretty much a lost case, as far as science ed goes.

All we can do is make sure there are opportunities for those interested to learn. The vast majority of these kids will. The rest... why worry about it, as far as science education is concerned? A calculus or physics class will do them no more good than a class in Sanskrit. They won't like it, and they'll forget about it, and it'll generally be a waste of time all around for all involved. The truth of it is that hard math and science really isn't for most people. Instead of trying to cram more kids in an AP Physics class, we should instead provide better general science classes to kids that are more interesting and that give an appreciation for the fact that science and math is important. What you really want is a large population that supports math and science, not one that does math and science. The later is unrealistic.

This has always been seen as a big problem. People thought that all the advances in technology would obsolete a bunch of jobs. It wasn't long ago that many white collar workers had their own secretary. Those jobs don't exist anymore. We've been pretty good at finding jobs for "normal" or "mediocre" people for the past 100 years, but I see it slowly coming to a point where there are very few jobs in America (or "the west" for that matter) for normal people. Self checkout grocery stores, online shopping, no more music and video stores, robots assembling cars, all of this stuff adds up. People will either have to get a skill doing something that can't be off-shored or done by robots, like car mechanic, barber, tailor, etc. There won't be much room for people working in the manufacturing sector, retail sector, or many other shrinking industries.

When people REPEATEDLY claim that disagreeing over the origin of the human species means that people "outright reject the scientific thought process", I'd say we've got some serious concerns going on here, yes. Did you even READ the frickin' question in the poll? Your conclusion is not based on the evidence.

Did you even READ the frickin' question in the poll? Your conclusion is not based on the evidence.

Did you? It's actually worse than portrayed. When asked directly "Do you think Creationism, that is, the idea that God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years is definitely true, probably true, probably false, (or) definitely false?", 39% said definitely true and another 27% said probably true.

If that's not outright rejecting the scientific thought process, I don't know.

Why are people here so damn obsessed with religion VS science debate? It's not a significant issue (queue up apocryphal stories...). Virtually every scientist in the history of science was religious and science has progressed nicely despite the fact that the vast majority of the human population is religious.

People tend to focus on these obscure side issues like creationism, etc. I am as conservative as they come, I was raised in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and spend all my time with people who are religious to one degree or another. No one I know sees a significant conflict here,

Evangelistic aethistic scientists have a fundamental disagreement with the attitude that humans can segregate parts of their lives into different thought processes. They think that someone cannot perform rational thought in one area of their life with demonstratable proof that they have logical flaws in other areas. The problem IMO with this line of thought is that they are pretending the human approximation to logic is closer to how we should think than the evolutionary-designed heuristic processes that allow us to think. We think within a context of data chunks, between roughly 5 and 9 chunks of data at any one time. As we gain expertise, then our chunks grow to encompass wider concepts, but we are still limited to a processing blob that deals with reality in a very segmented context. That isn't to say there aren't places that a religious scientist needs to be careful, but it is quite as intellectually honest as any other method.

Evangelistic aethistic scientists have a fundamental disagreement with the attitude that humans can segregate parts of their lives into different thought processes. They think that someone cannot perform rational thought in one area of their life with demonstratable proof that they have logical flaws in other areas. The problem IMO with this line of thought is that they are pretending the human approximation to logic is closer to how we should think than the evolutionary-designed heuristic processes that allow us to think. We think within a context of data chunks, between roughly 5 and 9 chunks of data at any one time. As we gain expertise, then our chunks grow to encompass wider concepts, but we are still limited to a processing blob that deals with reality in a very segmented context. That isn't to say there aren't places that a religious scientist needs to be careful, but it is quite as intellectually honest as any other method.

This sounds a lot like doublethink to me. From 1984:

"To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself – that was the ultimate subtlety; consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink."

I think your 'fundamentalist atheistic scientists' are right to look down upon such behaviour.

If my brain isn't chunking religous thought into the same chunk as scientific thought, then it is baffling to me how someone can think that someone would think how one chunk would corrupt the other. If my brain is chunking them both together it is baffling how a religious man ties his shoes in the morning. As posted somewhere in the mass of comments above (I'm not sure if even this thread), a number of scientists with foundational principles have been able to successfully arrange their thoughts in such a

If my brain isn't chunking religous thought into the same chunk as scientific thought, then it is baffling to me how someone can think that someone would think how one chunk would corrupt the other. If my brain is chunking them both together it is baffling how a religious man ties his shoes in the morning. As posted somewhere in the mass of comments above (I'm not sure if even this thread), a number of scientists with foundational principles have been able to successfully arrange their thoughts in such a way as to accomodate religion. The scary part occurs when people make policy or scientific decisions by chunking religion with science and you can't detect that. However, there are a number of other subjects when chunked with science makes for results just as terrible, e.g. politics, e.g. money, e.g. fame.

Many great thinkers seem to have managed to separate their religious beliefs from their rational mind, for a while at least anyway. However their beliefs were often ultimately responsible for their fall from grace. Just look at Newton, he contributed much to science but was also strongly religious; he jumped the shark later and spent the latter part of his life writing discourses disputing the holy trinity and experimenting with alchemy (giving himself mercury poisoning in the process). Einstein was also re

The whole science vs religion thing is a straw man. The idea of the rational unbiased scientist is also somewhat mythological. This history of the big bang theory, the current prevailing cosmological theory on the original of the universe, is quite insightful. The theory was offered by a Roman Catholic priest. Some of the leading scientists of the day dismissed this theory merely because it was developed by a priest, they dismissed it as "smelling of creationism".

If you want to make a claim that some group is anti-science it would be accurate to say that *some* churches may be so. The truth is that many other churches are perfectly fine with science. That scientific observations and discoveries are not in conflict with faith. Again, the whole notion of the universe originating in a big bang billions of years ago came from a priest. The western tradition of the scientific method was promoted by a bishop and other members of the clergy. The Roman Catholic church operates a world class observatory doing serious cosmological research in cooperation with other leading world class universities.

To say that religion is anti-science, well, that seems to display a mindset awfully similar to some preacher claiming that the earth was created six thousand years ago. Both comments delivered with absolute authority and passion, both comments being objectively and demonstrably false, both comments none the less held as as articles of *faith* of their respective mindsets. Reality if far more complicated than either of these mindsets believe.

The [Big Bang] theory was offered by a Roman Catholic priest. Some of the leading scientists of the day dismissed this theory merely because it was developed by a priest, they dismissed it as "smelling of creationism".

Not because it came from a priest, but because the church was specifically trying to frame it as proof of creation. Lamaitre had to write the pope telling him the science implied no such thing and asking him to please stop saying it did.

Basically, even while being a priest, Lamaitre was wise enough to keep religion out of his science.

The [Big Bang] theory was offered by a Roman Catholic priest. Some of the leading scientists of the day dismissed this theory merely because it was developed by a priest, they dismissed it as "smelling of creationism".

Not because it came from a priest, but because the church was specifically trying to frame it as proof of creation. Lamaitre had to write the pope telling him the science implied no such thing and asking him to please stop saying it did. Basically, even while being a priest, Lamaitre was wise enough to keep religion out of his science.

I do not believe that would "exonerate" those scientists. Whether the pope liked or disliked a scientific theory is irrelevant from a scientific perspective. The fact that they made such a comment still indicates an inherent hostility to the theory due to its possible alignment with a theology. They seem to have acted very much like that pope, forming an opinion on a scientific theory due to possible alignment with a theology, merely of the opposite "polarity".

I tell you what, show me the science tests where kids fail miserably at an understanding of evolution but score crazy high on common place science matters like basic physics and chemistry and I might begin you think to have something there.

The bottom line is that it matters little when you question evolution if Little Johnny can't understand high school Physics 1, Biology 1 or Chemistry 1. To date I haven't seen of a religious group that's trying to get f=ma or the earth orbiting the sun tossed out of the science classroom but I bet you there are more students who don't understand these concepts as there are those who reject evolution.

You make it sound like there is a substantial number of people in this nation who are still following Christian dogma from the 6th century and this simply isn't true. The questions where religion and science are likely to conflict are so few that they're not going to have an overbearing effect on the testing. Little of what's taught on the high school level is controversial.

Stop making religion your punching bag for ten minutes and consider *where* these students are failing in science and math and you'll see that religion isn't a problem. At least not as much of a mountain as you make it to be from the molehill it started from.

Wish I had mod points, because what you are saying is nonsense and overrated.

Sounds like you are in the group that is all for science, like the gov of California, who now holds education hostage to plug the budget, while flushing 60 billion to the unions to build a train no one will ever use.

How could this be deemed insightful? It is a gross oversimplification and mostly wrong. Religion has waged wars against segments of science that involve the past and trying to ascertain what has happened. Prime examples are evolution and methods for dating fossils. Religion has left most (aka 99.9999999%) of chemistry, biology, physics, astronomy, and on and on completely alone. Claiming that religion is "trying to legislate science out of the class room" is nothing but hyperbole derived from an obviou

Religion is science's enemy alright, but the real threat to science is the growing for profit education market that keeps pushing testing and the importance of their products over the needs, experience, and autonomy of classroom teachers and students. They are sucking far more money out of the pipeline directed toward educating students and building the necessary infrastructure essential to actually create future jobs than any random absurd religious notion.

My main criticism of NCLB is: What about the children who are ahead? They wind up being held back waiting for their peers to catch up (getting bored in the meantime since they have to learn the same material over and over lest their slower peers bring down test scores). I have no problem with helping the slower kids get up to speed, but we've also got to help the faster kids fulfill their potential which doesn't mean telling them "Just sit there quietly until the rest of the class learns that 8 + 3 = 11."

From Wikipedia: "The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB)[1][2] is a United States Act of Congress that came about as wide public concern about the state of education. First proposed by the administration of George W. Bush immediately after he took office,[3] the bill passed in the U.S. Congress with bipartisan support."

Isn't it the right of every generation to complain of the generations coming after them? I see my kids (in public schools) having more rigorous standards and classes than when I was younger, yet I work in a bleeding edge field in the world of technology. Perhaps we have all become cynical to the point that we think kids today won't make it...although that seems to hold true by every older generation.

Grades should be based on participation, and how 'far' a student move forward in the subject.

So what do you do when you have a student who aces every exam you throw at him, but never does homework and routinely cuts class? The problem is that no single grading standard could possibly be fair to all students, and if you give the student who aces exams without putting in any effort, you get a flood of complaints from other students and their parents about how unfair it is -- unfair that they have to work hard to understand the material.

the undue amount of focus now on standardized tests. Teaching to the test, as it where.

remember, test makers make test designed to test things kids don't know, not what kids have learned. When the teaching focus becomes teaching the test, we have difficult.

Grades should be based on participation, and how 'far' a student move forward in the subject.

A kids trying hes damndest and getting a B is better then a kid getting an easy A.

The problem with removing standardized testing is that you'd revert to a situation where we really had no idea if they were learning anything at all before. At least if they pass the standardized tests, we know they have at least a basic grasp of that material. Testing was implemented precisely because of your "participation" idea... you had kids getting decent to good to even great grades just for "class participation"... when they really weren't learning the material.

And frankly, some of the crying about the standardized tests are just silly. It's not like these test have esoteric things on them that the students don't need to know. They're standardized so that there's an assurance of a uniform field of common knowledge that's been gained. Some of it is through rote instruction, but so what? Rote instruction can be very useful. Tweak and reform testing, but don't chuck it aside completely.

A kids trying hes damndest and getting a B is better then a kid getting an easy A.

Sorry, I want to reward the medical student or the mechanical engineer that gets the "easy A" because he/she truly knows the stuff rather than the student that "makes the most improvement"...

sad but true, kids, students, humans are not born equally endowed with smarts and ease of acquiring skills. The flaw of "No child gets left behind", is no child gets ahead. The best and brightest should be given every means to do as best

The fact is that throughout history, only a tiny minority were educated to the standards of their day. In modern times, the percentages are significantly higher and are increasing over time. That we are not at 100% does not matter. That we may never reach 100% also does not matter.

Our education is great for the 1% who can afford private school, private tutors, and so forth. For the majority who need to go to public schools, our education system is terrible. The article points to the successes of those whose parents could afford to give them the best education money can buy.

My German friends were expected to be able to solve calculus problems in order to graduate high school. Calculus was considered college level when I went to high school, and still is. Girls achieving parity

There's more to education than attending school 5-days a week. I practically slept through school, never studied for a test, and only brought homework home when I had to type it on my computer. Yet my GPA was still excellent. It's because I wanted to learn, not go on American Idol or join the Jersey Shore. When I got my first computer, the stipulation was that I had to fix it when it broke. So it breaks, I learn how to fix it, so I can keep playing Command and Conquer Red Alert. In that process I am l

Are you talking about differential calculus? In this case, i guess, somebody German mistranslated "High School". Differential calculus in Germany is either college level, or -if you choose to specialize on maths/science- part of 12th class higher leading schools, which are not "High Schools". Education systems are quite different, so there's no direct analogy but our middle schools would be next to US high schools.

For the majority who need to go to public schools, our education system is terrible. The article points to the successes of those whose parents could afford to give them the best education money can buy.

This is not universally true. I have a PhD in biochemistry, and until college I had always attended American public schools. So did many of my close friends, who now have PhDs as well. The (large, urban) high school I attended had some massive systemic problems that are probably unfixable, but at least 60% of our graduating class went to four-year colleges, including about ten or so students who attended Ivy League schools. I have very little good to say about those four years of my life, but I honestly think most of the teachers did the best they could with what they had. The quality of the science education was very mixed, but we had some terrific innovative programs (especially marine science and tech ed) that were as good as anything the private schools could offer. I know I'm not the only student who was inspired to pursue a scientific career as a result of this.

The biggest problem I faced was that a faction of the education bureaucracy was fiercely opposed to college prep courses (because they were elitist) and wanted to homogenize the curriculum. This was not the fault of the teacher's union or the politicians; I still haven't figured out where these people get their ideas. (Just to clarify, "these people" were very racially diverse - a handful of white teachers were some of the loudest advocates at my school.) However, it was every bit as anti-intellectual a movement as the right-wingers trying to force pseudoscience into the classroom. By the time I was partway through high school, my parents decided they didn't like where things were headed, and sent my siblings to a private high school (where they appear to have received the same quality education, albeit with less senseless brutality).

The more general problem is that funding is indeed limited - the difference between a high-quality private school and a large public school is that the classes in the latter will be twice as large, so teachers can't give individual students they attention they require (or that their parents feel they deserve). The really smart students will always be screwed unless there are enough of them to fill a classroom - otherwise you have to explain to the PTA why five students get their own teacher for AP American History while the rest of the students get class sizes of 30.

My German friends were expected to be able to solve calculus problems in order to graduate high school. Calculus was considered college level when I went to high school, and still is.

The high school I attended had not one but two levels of calculus - I took AP Calculus I my senior year. All you need is enough students at that level to fill a classroom, and we had enough for two periods. That was actually one of my favorite courses in all of high school - it was the first time math seemed truly intuitive to me.

There are other large countries, so I don't think that's all that is going on. A major part seems to be that the tail end of science ability is very long. The US does a very good job of encouraging the really talented kids, giving them good educations and lots of resources. So even as the average is bad, the outliers from the fat tail are very good. Unfortunately, for some things (political decisions on science related issues, making informed medical decisions, etc.) the knowledge level of the general popul

the US was the second lowest in the OECD [nationalgeographic.com] in terms of evolution acceptance, with just 14% saying "definitely true" and a third saying "absolutely false" (as a side note, Iceland, where I live, is #1 in terms of acceptance - whoo!)

Until the public can come to grips with the basic tenets of science, yes, America is lagging way behind.

And I'm sorry, this "Americans suck at standardized testing" excuse is one of the flimsiest I've ever heard. Their only counterevidence -- that which has been accomplished in the US and the quality of US universities -- is hardly pinned on the understanding of science of the average American. It's a combination of the understanding of science of the top percentiles of Americans combined with research and venture capital networks and a strong H1B program (scaled by a population of over 300 million).

The US is a large, extremely diverse country. Doesn't it stand to reason that if you lump every kid in such a place into a single category and test them on something that the overall results are going to come out to be about average? Maybe it's just really, really hard for anyone to upset that bell curve by too much? Maybe improving the bell curve isn't as important as we think it is? Perhaps it's the outliers that are the most important for cultural success? These are basically the questions the article asks and, while it pretends to have the answers, I doubt many or any of them are backed up by actually facts.

Personally I actually agree with them. The goal should be to get as many people as possible up to the education level that they themselves can tell if they enjoy it and excel at at, then provide resources for those who are capable of greatness to achieve that greatness.

The article is correct in a lot of respects. But one thing I personally disagree with is that we should quit fretting. If you believe you are the best in the world at something, you might quit working hard to achieve that and stagnate into irrelevance. Personally I always view myself as "behind the curve" and therefore I am always working harder to overcome my self-perceived adjustment.

Likewise, when I am judging the United States, I'm often harsh. Because it's not going to get any better if I say "Yep, education is top notch, best in the world. We're #1." Unsurprisingly enough, my Republican friends call me a self-loathing liberal because my criticisms of the United States are often harsh. Better that than the alternative of stagnation and irrelevance.

American science education might not be 'dismal' but valid criticisms abound. Also, the measurements used for it being dismal or great are almost always flawed. For example, in the article:

Yet during this period of national "mediocrity," we created Silicon Valley, built multinational biotechnology firms, and continued to lead the world in scientific journal publications and total number of Nobel Prize winners. We also invented and sold more than a few iPads. Obviously, standardized tests aren't everything.

Surely, every one of these things had influences and inspiration other than the "United States public science education"? I'm reminded of someone from Alabama chastising me for complaining about states that have low literacy rates. She reminded me that Huntsville has more post-graduate degree holders per capita than any other city in the United States. Great. Good for them. Does that have anything to do with whether or not a random 15 year old can read in Alabama? You can cherry pick statistics one way or the other, I think China's got more published academic papers per year now than any other nation... of course the quality over quantity can be argued.

Don't be afraid to look at yourself critically -- if you don't how will you ever improve?

When one views the whole picture, there is a reason that people have grave concerns. A couple examples:

A friend of mine from China has his tuition, room, board, and such paid by the Chinese government to attend classes here in the US. He is planning to go into chemical engineering as soon as he graduates. Cost of education for degree to him? 0 yuan.

A relative of mine from Germany graduated college. His room, board, and tuition was paid for by the German government, and he is employed at a firm there de

I read TFA. It was basically a political screed with little useful information. However, I tend to agree with the conclusion that it ain't so bad here in America. I tend to believe that maybe we're too science literate in America. I've got a ton of friends with high quality PhD's in chemistry who find themselves out of work or under-employed. Most of the STEM worries are veiled attempts to allow companies to hire scientists at pauper wages or to get tax advantages for off-shoring scientific research.

1) Noting that science literacy among high-school aged test-takers increased 2%. with no offered hypothesis as to the cause of the increase2) Noting that the US has top higher-education metrics (without noting the high number of foreigners producing those metrics)3) Noting that there are some high-tech companies in the US and scientific achievements take place here sometimes4) Noting that girls achieved parity with boys in math (not noting whether that was just because boys' scores fell, or what)5) Noting that Bush's No Child Left Behind policies were in place during some of these events

That's it. Then they say they aren't defending NCLB and take a quick jab at Obama and immediately say they are actually not doing those things in the very next paragraph.

Also, this was a piece by RealClearPolitics, which is 51% owned by Forbes and is known for conservative bias. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealClearPolitics

I'm... not convinced that their argument is sound, to say the least. And not only because they failed at any point to argue for a better metric than our actual test-score rankings. They basically say "we invented iPads therefore science education is fine".

Assumption that the government spends too much on education and wants to spend more-- check.

Hinting that Obama is subverting the system for political motives-- check.

Whether or not the article has a good point-- it may be true that we're not as badly off as we think-- the article is written in a divisive way by someone who clearly leans toward the Republican end of things. Throughout the article, there's the running implication that all the doom and gloom is a scam, perpetrated by Democrats, in order to get more funding for education. However, even if we stipulate that our educational system is good, there's still another explanation: As a rule, people throughout history have believed that "the system" is falling apart and they were witnessing the downfall of civilization.

However, I would offer another interpretation of what's going on. For one thing, I would be very careful about trusting any particular standardized test, and even about trusting standardized tests in general. When you say, "Students scored higher on the ABC test this year than the year before!" you can't necessarily assume that students have been educated better. It may be a reflection of changes made to the test. The increase may not be statistically significant. It may be that the teachers started "teaching to the test" at the expense of other lessons. It may be that the school system pulled some other shenanigans to manipulate the test scores. It may be that the test was simply poorly formed in the first place, and is not actually a good reflection of the educational level of the students.

The article begins with a quote about how education is suffering, and then goes on to note that the quote is from *all the way* back in 1983. This may be a sign that the doom-saying has been going on for a long time and does not reflect a real problem. Or it might mean that the educational system has been suffering since at least as far back as 1983. In fact, I'm sure that there are people who would claim that to be the case.

I was puzzled by their reference to a study placing the cost of K - 12 education at the second highest at $91,700 per student (that is a cumulative cost, not annual). The study coves ages 6 - 15, but states K - 12, which would typically be 5 - 18. A look at the PDF, suggests that the headline is just the 6 - 15 age group as it reports, "A high school graduate in 2009 had $149,000 spent on his 13 year public school education." It also states that the US pays more for only middle of the road results that have

...I would guess that the answer is poverty. My wife and I went to see Cornell West speak several months ago and one of the things he pointed out about our educational system is that if you take out the test scores of children who are living in poverty, the U.S. ranks at or near number one in the world in education.

Currently the U.S. has the second worst child poverty rate of the 23 countries listed here [nationmaster.com], and higher education rankings general correlate with lower child poverty rates.

Additionally, the latest study released by Universitas 21, a global network of research universities, concluded that the United States ranks No. 1 in the world in higher education

Yeah, let's have a closer look at that study... in the summary:

Overall, the top five countries, nominally providing the 'best' higher education were found to be the United States, Sweden, Canada, Finland and Denmark. However, broken down into the smaller sections, it was interesting to see that the US, traditionally seen as a country with one of the strongest education systems, did not always hit the top spot.

Huh. I wonder if that warrants a closer look at the actual data? Nah, fuck it. USA! USA! USA!

Spoiler: The US only comes out on top because our universities churn out more science publications. This alone is no indication of quality or relevance (there is some reason to think that it's not that great [slashdot.org]), nor of general quality of academic performance. In all other metrics the US is #3, #4 or #36... out of 50.

And what about big scary China? Adult science literacy there is a paltry 3% compared with the U.S. at 28%. In short, our overall science performance isn't too shabby for a country that has supposedly neglected science education for years.

3% of 1,340,000,000 is 40,200,000.28% of 312,000,000 is 87,360,000.

So despite having nearly ten times the per-capita literacy rate, we're just barely above twice the total population. China is also catching up plenty fast. Maybe we should do something about it before we're behind?

So, why do Americans believe that science education is in a downward spiral when the empirical evidence shows the opposite?

Maybe it's the active effort by the religious-right to specifically exclude actual science from science education, or the systemic denial of scientific truths such as global climate change and biological evolution, or the cynical politicizing of science in general.

This alone does not tell us what's really going on. How hard were the tests? What is the scope of the curriculum? If I was a math teacher I could make every test a single question: "1 + 1 = __ (a) 2 (b) 2 (c) 2 (d) All of the Above " and then claim all my students got perfect scores. Test performance means nothing without accounting for the quality of the test.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Well what if it's not broken per se, but merely not adequate anymore? Or heaven forbid, maybe we could continue to seek to improve our education system despite how good you think it already is!=Smidge=

This is a discussion... maybe the summary was a teaser to get us to click the discussion where our best minds can get together refute the supposed straw man. And besides, deconstructing straw man arguments is popular around here.

The "why" is in the article: "In 1964, the first time an international standardized test was given, American kids were next to last. In the most recent assessment, in 2009, the U.S. scored 17th in science out of 34 countries.

"So, why do Americans believe that science education is in a downward spiral when the empirical evidence shows the opposite? Because officials keep telling us that education is abysmal. Also, they seem to hold a grudge against No Child Left Behind (NCLB), which holds teachers accountab

WTF, another union bashing post? There are lobbyists everywhere - think textbook publishers, Universities, people that want to privatize the public educations system, etc. that would all gain by downplaying the success of the education system.

When you look at the pay, I don't think you can call a teacher's salary high by any standard.

Picking a number out of your ass (95%) isn't going to help anyone. You can't just decide that 95% of kids can attain a "basic grasp of science" (as defined by achieving a particular score on a standardized test) and declare utter failure if you don't get there. Not every kid is going to be able to meet those standards, and some who maybe can won't care enough to try. Lack of scientific literacy does not equate to failure in life.

It's good to pay attention to where there are deficiencies and make improvem

First, when you call anything you don't like "a religion", you discredit yourself. I, personally, find it amusing that you have the hubris to call the majority of the scientists in the world, and every country's national science body part of "a false religion" because you disagree with them.

Second, neither point is "still out in the debate":1) Humans are causing it [skepticalscience.com], no other explanations fits the facts.2) It's a bad thing [skepticalscience.com]. On economic grounds, estimates for end of century spending for deal with the effects of Global warming are close to 7.5 trillion, and the costs of averting it less than 2 trillion. Then there's the moral problem of having poor and undeveloped nations shoulder most of the worst consequences of our fossil fuel use.

Interesting, so you would maintain that the only people who are unbiased enough to comment on Anthropogenic Climate Change are people who are not at all involved in studying it? Because anyone who is an expert of the topic, might have a financial, career, academic, or ideological basis for supporting it?

Of course if you hadn't "stopped reading" at the site name you could have read the explanations and used a factual argument to try and prove your point, instead of writing a foolish ad hominem argument. Si

The union problem is not necessarily teacher salary. There might be a problem where some teachers make little to no contribution to benefits like health care and retirement, but that is a really complicated issue that can't be generalized. Contracts can vary from place to place, some reasonable, some not. The real union problem is probably union support for teachers who are not good teachers. The unions no longer seem to be the guardians of their craft, enforcing their own high standards of quality upon their members. Unions used to kick out members who couldn't perform to high standards. Today some claim that some union leadership is essentially a part of the educational bureaucracy protecting the status quo.

That is one of the most sane explanations I've heard in a long time. Unions are a great idea and vital to the interests of even non-union employees. It's crazy to me the lack of regard for history that led to the formation of unions to begin with. Seems these days some unions have gone too far while others do as you say and protect people that aren't up to standards. The thing is, in every case where it seems the company can't afford to sustain their union staff the unions seem to see reason and accept pay

And no child left behind actually hurt students. Instead of having them repeat a grade since they didn't learn anything (the reasons for that aside for the moment) that student was sent to the next grade unpaired for that grade. That process keeps on repeating. This is from over 300 teachers. They were not allowed to fail a student. No NCLB is bad.

The reasons for a student not learning can be that student does not care. In those cases either hav

NCLB, Unions, bad teachers, improper testing, all that junk is only a tiny fraction of the problem. How can you expect the best performance when there is an element in our culture that looks upon education as a bad thing? From my own experiences, teaching a student is *nowhere* near as hard as convincing them to care enough to work hard at learning. Now, yes, there are school districts that struggle to function out of sheer lack of resources. But as for the others, the infrastructure is there. The material

When I look at teachers pay I have no problem calling it high. How about $93k/year [teacherssalary.net] in Boulder, CO. $80-ish in surrounding communities like Longmont, and Fort Collins. $75k in Madison, WI where they're trying to recall Walker today.

Boulder is an expensive place to live, but I have a hard time believing the average public school teachers is $93k. Are you sure this isn't taking into consideration private schools and UofC? And it's interesting that you didn't take into consideration the most obvious adjacent community...Denver...which averages $32k less than boulder. And you lied, Longmont and Fort Collins average around $69k according to this website, not $80ish.

That site you pointed to hasn't got anything close to accurate data for teacher pay. Take home is typically closer to half what that site says. Here's the North Carolina (where I live) official teacher pay schedule [ncpublicschools.org].

Starting salary for teachers with teaching degrees is $34,550. With > 30 years experience, a teacher makes $58,860. Now I wont argue the benefits aren't good, but you've got wildly inaccurate data.

I think you vastly underestimate what it takes to be a good teacher and have simultaneously identified what I would consider one of the most significant issues in public education. You assert that you "could easily teach any high school subject...". Do you have any training in teaching, or do you just assume anyone can make a good teacher? Sounds like the latter. And yet I suspect you probably could get and keep a job teaching and even attain tenure if you really wanted to, but that's more a function of poor management (or maybe misguided union protection, but I don't want to get into that discussion here) than how easy it is to be a teacher. I have school-age kids, so I know there are teachers who really should find a different line of work.

You indicate you are a developer, which means you probably have experience with at least a few managers. Have they all been exemplary (in which case consider yourself very lucky), or have you run into some, like I have, that you thought were entirely inadequate at their job? Just as not everyone is cut out to be a manager, not everyone can be a good teacher.

Oh, and the word you made up ("consumerate") would support my gut feel that you probably would not be the great and wondrous teacher you think you would be.

Maybe so, but how much does a dev job pay there? I'd imagine not much more than that.

What's the relevance? My point is, he is clearly exaggerating to support his argument. Why not use average pool boy salaries in Beverly Hills as an example of national pool boy salaries? Because it's a number that's too skewed by the localized wealth to have anything to do with the national average.

well, for starters, the concept behind NCLB as nothing to do with actually not leaving any children behind. In fact it sets up a system where schools have an economic incentive to find ways to rid themselves of children who are not doing well.

I agree much of the debate over it is philosophical since the majority of people outside education, economics, and psychology know very little about the relative effects of using a punishment/quantitative dynamic rather then a reward/qualitative one. I say people outside because in general the proponents of NCLB do not have any background in the field and used the legislation to test their private theories about how things should be done, including having a nice packaged up metric that is not really based on anything but they can point towards to say it is working.

Under this new system, children get left behind all the bloody time. Anything that does not contribute to getting that small set of numbers up is pretty much set aside in order to hyper focus on the one metric that determines what your budget is going to be like. There is no incentive for enrichment, no incentive for after school programs, no incentive to give the advanced students the tools that will help them succeed or to help the LD students since they absorb a disproportionate amount of resources relative to their score impact.

I agree, the stated goal of NCLB, the one used on the press package and political rhetoric is a good one, but that is where it ends. It was a law designed by amateurs who, like all armchair xyz, thought that they knew better then all those 'experts', and it was designed to be sold to an electorate that is also made up of people with no domain knowledge.

And of course when people who know what they are talking about raised objections, they can easily (politically) be written off as 'protecting the status quo' and 'just unions interested in fat paychecks'... and of course a couple years down the road you have a perfect mechanism for slashing budgets of poor schools (which fits in nicely with the 'poor people are poor because they are stupid and deserve it) and raise budgets of wealthy schools (which fits in nicely with the 'rich people are rich because they are smart and deserve it) and of course push more of our educational system into private hands (which strongly favors people with wealth, who have no interest in helping to fund the public system) so there is even less incentive to have a healthy public one.

I think TFA and TFS misses the point: The problem isn't that we don't have decent science education; the problem is that we don't create scientists.

Look at any science or engineering school in the U.S. and it becomes pretty clear. There are many, many more foreigners than Americans. Now go look at the liberal arts programs: Nothing but Americans. The country and the world don't need more out-of-work English majors. There not a shortage of tech jobs right now, particularly in engineering, but also in other hard sciences.

Maybe if "we" got out of the mindset of wanting to pay third world wages, people would move to these kinds of fields?

It is funny, in my opinion, the ones to the greatest extent setting wages ( trying to keep them low ) seem to be the ones lamenting the fact that people don't want those jobs, and all the while praising the market for all the magic it can do ( and it can ).

You have to look at it in terms of opportunity cost. Compare the amount of effort and cost of going to school for engineering and science Masters or PhD, versus the the job you could get (both pay/benefits and intangibles). Compare that with an MBA or Finance degree and the kind of job you can get with that.

Be wary of education lobbyists who downplay our long track record of scientific success while simultaneously asking for more money.

In scientific circles, there's a long history of doing this openly and honestly. I've seen it expressed as a joke: "The most important part of a scientific paper is the paragraph near the end saying that further research is needed." This is funny, yes, but it's also an open admission that there are still lots of things that we don't understand at all, and it'll take time and money and hard work to learn about them.

Science education echoes this. We are continually producing new children to replace the

Teachers are not the enemy and it makes me sad to see an anti-education screed on Slashdot.

Let's deconstruct your post.

First off, "officials" -- also known as "teachers" and "local school board members" -- hate the No Child Left Behind Act [wikipedia.org] because it is an unfunded standards-based mandate for additional instruction. The second standards rear their ugly heads in classrooms you start seeing rote learning [wikipedia.org], AKA "teaching for the test." No one benefits from rote learning. Not even the businesses that depend on the school system to turn out creative and innovative thinkers with a broad knowledge base to draw on. And while it may be responsible for an increase in test scores, students suffer in ways standardize tests can't measure.

Second, school spending. I don't know where you're getting your numbers from, so I'll have to improvise. The federal goverment's per-pupil spending (you may find how influential federal money really is [ed.gov] enlightening from a big-picture perspective) has barely kept pace with inflation, and that's without going into all the ways the feds twist the arms of desperately underfunded local school districts with laws like NCLB, which cuts funding to the underperforming schools that need it the most (in the name of "competitiveness"). If you really want to know how much is getting spent per-pupil you should take a look at the detailed breakdown [census.gov] from the Census Bureau (warning, PDF). And yes, salaries are the biggest number in the list. Because the most important resource in education is PEOPLE.

We also need to talk about per-pupil spending in general, where the fundamental inequality inherent in education funding [ed.gov] is most readily apparent. You can't just say that one area's per-pupil funding level is adequate for another's thanks to things like cost-of-living and property values. Most schools are funded at a local level, which opens you up to all kinds of funding issues brought on by things like population density and the economy. You know who was hurt the most by the recent foreclosure crisis? Here's a hint, it wasn't the homeowners, it was the school districts that depend on their property taxes.

You know what else bothers me? That all the amounts discussed in the above links are counted in the millions of dollars per year. We blow billions of dollars a week in Afghanistan and Iraq. It really shows you where the nation's priorities lie.

It is more than that. People just LOVE being told that their kids are stupid. So the official lies fall onto receptive ears.

In the past half century American kids' STEM scores have gone from next to last to 17 of 34 countries (about the middle). So that is an improvement. But that understates the improvement because at the same time, the scores of all the countries improved. So it is like our kids are running up an ascending escalator.

My son has a measured IQ north of 140 but is also autistic. He gets extra help to cope with his difficulty in communicating verbally and is well on his way to university and will be able to handle it without an aide. It is people like you who would have thrown him into an institution in the 40s and 50s.

I.e., the lack of communication skills means while the test scores go up, the ability to communicate goes down so they all look like a bunch of illiterates because no one can understand them? Science can't happen if you cannot communicate your work to others...

That applies to any job. Using my place of work as an example, there is zero communication between what the other bureaus need and the IT department. We routinely have people send us an email telling us they have someone that started that day and need an account and equipment set up.

When it comes to cabling, same thing. A room gets redone, the support services area has maintenance effectively cut and pull every cable rather than

Additionally, the latest study released by Universitas 21, a global network of research universities, concluded that the United States ranks No. 1 in the world in higher education — a metric that partially relies on scientific research output. (Sweden came in a distant second.)

From the description this seems like a stupid metric that would be obviously skewed towards countries with higher population. With a Sweden's population of almost 9.5 million verses the USA's 315 million one would HOPE that the scientific research output is significantly higher. While TFS doesn't go into depth about the actual metric, I figured I'd need to do some reading through some links.
I just looked at the report [universitas21.com] and it looks like the metric is more than that.

Total articles produced by higher ed facilities (gross AND per capita)

So it looks like that might not be that bad of a metric after all. It's far from perfect but there are probably few if any that are. All in all, I'm impressed that the USA is ranked number 1.

When looking through the ACTUAL scores of the different countries the USA scores a dismal 37 out of 50 in the "Proportion of international students in 3rd ed and proportion of articles co-authored by international collaborators". Where the USA far and away blows away the rest of the field is in the actual scientific article output (weighted by gross and per capita as noted above).

All in all, it's an interesting report that seems to fly in the face of most of slashdot's readership's (mine included) perception of the direction of the education system in the USA. Maybe most of the bad news is at the secondary education level?

The US has been able to attract top notch scientists that speak english for a long time. As essentially the wealthiest country of the lot, and english forming the biggest scientific block there's a natural advantage there. The US also has universities that can pay top scientists relatively large amounts of money. I'm in canada and the university I'm at (and the department I'm in) have had two professors who are particularly well renowned in their field, with several prestigious awards. But they get paid the same as everyone else, because there's no room to give them extra money. We are fortunate their spouses have low mobility jobs. One passed away due to heart attack earlier this year so we're down to one. But either way. If they were in the US they'd be easily making 250k and potentially up over 300k whereas here they're stuck at 120 ish. There are only a handful of universities in canada, the UK etc that can pay a premium for premium staff, and even then they can only afford a small group of them, because they charge the same per student as we do. (This would be, in canada. University of Toronto, U of British Columbia, in the Uk Cambridge, Oxford, Imperial College and a few others). In the US Harvard can have as many 400k/year staff as it wants.

In terms of actual scientific output the US isn't in a bad place, unless you consider reliance on foreign born scientists a problem (which it sort of is, and sort of isn't). Where they're always struggling is in science education at lower levels. And even there, there's only so much you can do. If you need 300k people to work assembly lines and 3000 to design the cars that are made on the lines there's only so much motivation for people to be scientifically literate anyway. When you have a political party that institutionally ignores science there's a reinforcement mechanism for generations of people to not learn, and be proud of not learning.

The grandparent poster misspoke.He meant to say close the ONE Department of Education in the Congress. The other 50 Departments of Education would remain open, at the state level, where they are close to the parents/students being served and therefore more accountable to their demands. Democratic Republics work best when the power is only a few miles away from the People and their participation, rather than ~1500 miles away and the people's voice does not get heard.

Followed by a hyperbolic attack on US researchers. Yes, Sir, you deserve to get modded down. Kind of like saying pretentiously, "I know you'll object because you can't handle the truth, but your mother is a dirty slut."

Contrary to popular believe many of the drop outs don't make it. They fail, end up without a single penny left in their pocket.
Additionally, comparing academic achievements in the US with how good the educational standard is considering it's largely based on immigrants. And these people are not a product of US education...

What I am talking about is giving consumers (parents) the ability to choose better schools over worse schools. This seems like an obvious principle, but right now, schools are chosen based on residency location, which means real-estate in good school districts is priced artificially high, and if you're poor, you have no opportunity to move to a good school district. Under the current system, only rich people can afford to live in a good school district.

Maybe the problem is astronomical tuition fees in the US? In some countries with more reasonable fees, people usually gravitate towards their natural inclinations, and if that be usually poorly paid science positions at universities and research institutions, so be it. But in the US, you can't afford the luxury to leave college with $100,000 or $120,000 debt and THEN take a measly paid job in science.